The call comes in the middle of the afternoon, while I'm running a training scenario in the back lot. Vanessa. I step away from the crew and answer it.
She sounds good — warm, unhurried, like someone who has figured out the shape of her own life and settled into it. "Hey. Is this an okay time?"
"Give me a second." I walk to the edge of the lot, gravel crunching underfoot, putting enough distance between myself and the noise. "Yeah. What's up?"
"Theo and I are taking Ivy to Disneyland," she says. "Then Seattle for a few days after. Ten days total. It fits with our custody schedule — I checked before I started planning — but I wanted to talk to you before I said anything to her."
Ten days. My chest does something complicated. "When?"
"Next week, if that works for you. I can adjust by a few days if you need."
Disneyland. Ivy is going to lose her mind. She's been asking about it since she saw a commercial last spring, with the specific intensity she applies to all things she wants — sustained, documented, brought up in conversation on a reliable rotating schedule, like a well-managed agenda item.
"It's good," I say. "She'll love it."
"I think so too." A pause, warm and uncomplicated. "She's going to want to meet every character. I'm building in extra time for that."
"She'll have notes about the dinosaur ones. Detailed ones."
Vanessa laughs. "She always has notes."
"Yeah." My throat is doing something I don't have time for. "She does."
"I'll send you the full itinerary. You can call whenever you want, obviously."
"Thanks, Vanessa."
"Take care of yourself, Beck."
She hangs up. More than a decade of marriage, and the call lasts three minutes. Efficient. Friendly. That's what we've gotten good at.
Ten days.
Ivy will have the time of her life. She will come home with a stuffed dinosaur she'll name on the spot and love with the fierceness she applies to everything she loves. She'll have stories that she tells in the wrong order at maximum volume, interrupting herself to add details she forgot to mention.
She'll be fine. She'll be better than fine.
But will I?
Shift ends. The drive home is quiet.
Ivy's at a sleepover at Emma's, so the house is mine and too large for one person. Her drawings are still on the refrigerator — a stegosaurus she insisted had "rainbow stripes because why not" — and her dinosaur pajamas are folded on the couch because she can never quite make it to her room with them. A juice cup, half-empty, on the coffee table.
I should clean up. I don't.
Instead, I take a beer I don't want out to the back porch and sit down and look at nothing.
The evening is cool. The mountains are doing their thing against the darkening sky — purple going to charcoal, the first smear of stars above the ridge. Somewhere down the block, a dog is barking about something it's decided is urgent. Crickets. A car passing on the main road.
The beer is cold in my hand. I don't drink it.
Ten days. The house will be like this. Quiet and too large and full of her things without her in it, and I'll move through it carefully, the way you move through a space that belongs to someone else.
I was supposed to be better at alone by now. I've had practice.
The light in Gemma's suite has been on since I got home. Acoustic guitar from whatever playlist she keeps on in the evenings drifts through the shared wall, soft and unhurried.
She's home.
